Did a Meteorite, or Nerdy Hoaxsters, Strike Latvia?

Sometimes, the sky really is falling, and other times it just seems that way.

Near the small town of Mazsalaca, Latvia on Sunday night, an object appeared to have crashed into the ground, leaving a gaping hole about more than 25 feet across. A YouTube video of the incident featured a group of excitable Latvians rushing to the hole and exclaiming their astonishment with English swear words.

But something about this presumed meteorite impact seemed fishy and conflicting reports emanated from the Baltic state about the nature of the incident. From stateside, it was impossible to tell what caused the hole just by looking at photos posted to a Latvian website.

“It could be a piece of space debris from a spacecraft, it could be a weird explosion, or it could be a meteorite,” said Michael Zolensky, a meteorite specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “The only way to know, though, is to dig it up.”

Now that Latvian scientists are examining the scene in the light of day, it appears to be a very nerdy hoax.

“The photographs and video footage showing the crater and material in the base of it burning indicates that the alleged meteorite crater in Latvia is not an impact crater — meteorites are not ‘on fire’ or even hot when they land on Earth,” wrote Caroline Smith, meteorite curator at the Natural History Museum, London, in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Additionally there have been no witness reports of any large ‘fireball’ sightings in the region on Sunday afternoon, when the crater was allegedly formed.”

Another Latvian scientist said the hole in the ground was dug with a shovel.

Zolensky’s colleague at Johnson Space Center, Gene Stansbury, an orbital debris specialist, said that their records do not indicate a piece of space debris scheduled for reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere. NASA generally tracks objects larger than a meter in size.

A network of Air Force satellites known as the Defense Support Program do track fireballs — which a real meteorite presumably would have caused — but Wired.com has been unable to confirm whether these satellites captured anything unusual.